Experimental Research for CMMB-Based Passive Radar Under a Multipath Environment

China mobile multimedia broadcasting (CMMB) is a digital television standard that works in a single-frequency network (SFN) at the ultrahigh frequency band and adopts orthogonal frequency division multiplex modulation with a cyclic prefix (CP-OFDM). This paper investigates the practical feasibility of a CMMB-based passive radar (CPR) in the multipath propagation environment. First, several aspects involving system considerations induced by propagation conditions and radar signal characteristics are analyzed, including power budget, dynamic range requirement, clutter rejection metrics, and ambiguity function analysis. Then targeting the problems caused by multipath signals in the complex propagation environment and corresponding processing techniques are discussed, covering reference signal extraction and clutter rejection, as well as, tracking and localization. The highlight is clutter rejection with subcarrier-based spatial adaptive processing (SSAP), which is matched with the features of CP-OFDM. The applicability of SSAP under severe channel response spread mainly contributed by SFN is specially considered. Last, a description of the experiments and the CPR systems developed by Wuhan University is given, together with results from previous field trials for low-altitude aircraft and ship detection.